OpenRaiser/Intern-Atlas huggingface dataset:
Detecting Urban Changes with Recurrent Neural Networks from Multitemporal Sentinel-2 Data
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2019
Year: 2019

\begin{abstract} The advent of multitemporal high resolution data, like the Copernicus Sentinel-2, has enhanced significantly the potential of monitoring the earth's surface and environmental dynamics. In this paper, we present a novel deep learning framework for urban change detection which combines state-of-the-art fully convolutional networks (similar to U-Net) for feature representation and powerful recurrent networks (such as LSTMs) for temporal modeling. We report our results on the recently publicly available bi-temporal Onera Satellite Change Detection (OSCD) Sentinel-2 dataset, enhancing the temporal information with additional images of the same region on different dates. Moreover, we evaluate the performance of the recurrent networks as well as the use of the additional dates on the unseen test-set using an ensemble cross-validation strategy. All the developed models during the validation phase have scored an overall accuracy of more than 95%, while the use of LSTMs and further temporal information, boost the F1 rate of the change class by an additional 1.5%.
Indoor Information Retrieval using Lifelog Data
Venue: arXiv cs.IR 2019
Year: 2019

Studying human behaviour through lifelogging has seen an increase in attention from researchers over the past decade. The opportunities that lifelogging offers are based on the fact that a lifelog, as a "black box" of our lives, offers rich contextual information, which has been an Achilles heel of information discovery. While lifelog data has been put to use in various contexts, its application to indoor environment scenario remains unexplored. In this proposal, I plan to design a method that enables us to capture and record indoor lifelog data of a person's life in order to facilitate healthcare systems, emergency response, item tracking etc. To this end, we aim to build an Indoor Information Retrieval system that can be queried with natural language queries over lifelog data. Judicious use of the lifelog data for the indoor application may enable us to solve very fundamental but non-avoidable problems of our daily life. Analysis of lifelog data coupled with Information Retrieval is not only a promising research topic, but the possibility of its indoor application especially for healthcare, lost-item tracking would be an innovative research idea to the best of our knowledge.
Service Wrapper: a system for converting web data into web services
Venue: arXiv cs.DB 2019
Year: 2019

Web services are widely used in many areas via callable APIs, however, data are not always available in this way. We always need to get some data from web pages whose structure is not in order. Many developers use web data extraction methods to generate wrappers to get useful contents from websites and convert them into well-structured files. These methods, however, are designed specifically for professional wrapper program developers and not friendly to users without expertise in this domain. In this work, we construct a service wrapper system to convert available data in web pages into web services. Additionally, a set of algorithms are introduced to solve problems in the whole conversion process. People can use our system to convert web data into web services with fool-style operations and invoke these services by one simple step, which greatly expands the use of web data. Our cases show the ease of use, high availability, and stability of our system.
Cascading: Association Augmented Sequential Recommendation
Venue: arXiv cs.IR 2019
Year: 2019

Recently, recommendation according to sequential user behaviors has shown promising results in many application scenarios. Generally speaking, real-world sequential user behaviors usually reflect a hybrid of sequential influences and association relationships. However, most existing sequential recommendation methods mainly concentrate on sequential relationships while ignoring association relationships. In this paper, we propose a unified method that incorporates item association and sequential relationships for sequential recommendation. Specifically, we encode the item association as relations in item co-occurrence graph and mine it through graph embedding by GCNs. In the meanwhile, we model the sequential relationships through a widely used RNNs based sequential recommendation method named GRU4Rec. The two parts are connected into an end-to-end network with cascading style, which guarantees that representations for item associations and sequential relationships are learned simultaneously and make the learning process maintain low complexity. We perform extensive experiments on three widely used real-world datasets: TaoBao, Amazon Instant Video and Amazon Cell Phone and Accessories. Comprehensive results have shown that the proposed method outperforms several state-of-the-art methods. Furthermore, a qualitative analysis is also provided to encourage a better understanding about association relationships in sequential recommendation and illustrate the performance gain is exactly from item association.
Using a KG-Copy Network for Non-Goal Oriented Dialogues
Venue: arXiv cs.CL 2019
Year: 2019

Non-goal oriented, generative dialogue systems lack the ability to generate answers with grounded facts. A knowledge graph can be considered an abstraction of the real world consisting of well-grounded facts. This paper addresses the problem of generating well grounded responses by integrating knowledge graphs into the dialogue systems response generation process, in an end-to-end manner. A dataset for nongoal oriented dialogues is proposed in this paper in the domain of soccer, conversing on different clubs and national teams along with a knowledge graph for each of these teams. A novel neural network architecture is also proposed as a baseline on this dataset, which can integrate knowledge graphs into the response generation process, producing well articulated, knowledge grounded responses. Empirical evidence suggests that the proposed model performs better than other state-of-the-art models for knowledge graph integrated dialogue systems.
End-to-end speech enhancement based on discrete cosine transform
Venue: arXiv cs.SD 2019
Year: 2019

Previous speech enhancement methods focus on estimating the short-time spectrum of speech signals due to its short-term stability. However, these methods often only estimate the clean magnitude spectrum and reuse the noisy phase when resynthesize speech signals, which is unlikely a valid short-time Fourier transform (STFT). Recently, DNN based speech enhancement methods mainly joint estimation of the magnitude and phase spectrum. These methods usually give better performance than magnitude spectrum estimation but need much larger computation and memory overhead. In this paper, we propose using the Discrete Cosine Transform (DCT) to reconstruct a valid short-time spectrum. Under the U-net structure, we enhance the real spectrogram and finally achieve perfect performance.
Kernel density estimation based sampling for imbalanced class distribution
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2019
Year: 2019

Imbalanced response variable distribution is a common occurrence in data science. In fields such as fraud detection, medical diagnostics, system intrusion detection and many others where abnormal behavior is rarely observed the data under study often features disproportionate target class distribution. One common way to combat class imbalance is through resampling the minority class to achieve a more balanced distribution. In this paper, we investigate the performance of the sampling method based on kernel density estimation (KDE). We believe that KDE offers a more natural way of generating new instances of minority class that is less prone to overfitting than other standard sampling techniques. It is based on a well established theory of nonparametric statistical estimation. Numerical experiments show that KDE can outperform other sampling techniques on a range of real life datasets as measured by F1-score and G-mean. The results remain consistent across a number of classification algorithms used in the experiments. Furthermore, the proposed method outperforms the benchmark methods irregardless of the class distribution ratio. We conclude, based on the solid theoretical foundation and strong experimental results, that the proposed method would be a valuable tool in problems involving imbalanced class distribution.
Engineering Top-Down Weight-Balanced Trees
Venue: arXiv cs.DS 2019
Year: 2019

Weight-balanced trees are a popular form of self-balancing binary search trees. Their popularity is due to desirable guarantees, for example regarding the required work to balance annotated trees. While usual weight-balanced trees perform their balancing operations in a bottom-up fashion after a modification to the tree is completed, there exists a top-down variant which performs these balancing operations during descend. This variant has so far received only little attention. We provide an in-depth analysis and engineering of these top-down weight-balanced trees, demonstrating their superior performance. We also gaining insights into how the balancing parameters necessary for a weight-balanced tree should be chosen - with the surprising observation that it is often beneficial to choose parameters which are not feasible in the sense of the correctness proofs for the rebalancing algorithm.
A Least Squares Approach to the Static Traffic Analysis of High-Latency Anonymous Communication Systems
Venue: arXiv cs.CR 2019
Year: 2019

Mixes, relaying routers that hide the relation between incoming and outgoing messages, are the main building block of high-latency anonymous communication networks. A number of so-called disclosure attacks have been proposed to effectively de-anonymize traffic sent through these channels. Yet, the dependence of their success on the system parameters is not well-understood. We propose the Least Squares Disclosure Attack (LSDA), in which user profiles are estimated by solving a least squares problem. We show that LSDA is not only suitable for the analysis of threshold mixes, but can be easily extended to attack pool mixes. Furthermore, contrary to previous heuristic-based attacks, our approach allows us to analytically derive expressions that characterize the profiling error of LSDA with respect to the system parameters. We empirically demonstrate that LSDA recovers users' profiles with greater accuracy than its statistical predecessors and verify that our analysis closely predicts actual performance.
Glueability of resource proof-structures: inverting the Taylor expansion (long version)
Venue: arXiv cs.LO 2019
Year: 2019

A Multiplicative-Exponential Linear Logic (MELL) proof-structure can be expanded into a set of resource proof-structures: its Taylor expansion. We introduce a new criterion characterizing those sets of resource proof-structures that are part of the Taylor expansion of some MELL proof-structure, through a rewriting system acting both on resource and MELL proof-structures.
Faster parameterized algorithm for Bicluter Editing
Venue: arXiv cs.DS 2019
Year: 2019

In the Bicluter Editing problem the input is a graph $G$ and an integer $k$, and the goal is to decide whether $G$ can be transformed into a bicluster graph by adding and removing at most $k$ edges. In this paper we give an algorithm for Bicluster Editing whose running time is $O^*(3.116^k)$.
Role of Ontology Training to Software Engineering Students
Venue: arXiv cs.SE 2019
Year: 2019

Students of software engineering struggle to develop a systems perspective because most of the software engineering methodologies focus on developing a particular aspect of a system. Lack of unified coverage to the topic of systems modelling is identified as the root cause behind this problem. The paper explains the role of ontology in building systems perspective. A case for the necessity of ontology training as a means to overcome this problem is presented. The course content for a typical course on ontology is also described in the paper.
Universal Text Representation from BERT: An Empirical Study
Venue: arXiv cs.CL 2019
Year: 2019

We present a systematic investigation of layer-wise BERT activations for general-purpose text representations to understand what linguistic information they capture and how transferable they are across different tasks. Sentence-level embeddings are evaluated against two state-of-the-art models on downstream and probing tasks from SentEval, while passage-level embeddings are evaluated on four question-answering (QA) datasets under a learning-to-rank problem setting. Embeddings from the pre-trained BERT model perform poorly in semantic similarity and sentence surface information probing tasks. Fine-tuning BERT on natural language inference data greatly improves the quality of the embeddings. Combining embeddings from different BERT layers can further boost performance. BERT embeddings outperform BM25 baseline significantly on factoid QA datasets at the passage level, but fail to perform better than BM25 on non-factoid datasets. For all QA datasets, there is a gap between embedding-based method and in-domain fine-tuned BERT (we report new state-of-the-art results on two datasets), which suggests deep interactions between question and answer pairs are critical for those hard tasks.
DeepFork: Supervised Prediction of Information Diffusion in GitHub
Venue: arXiv cs.SI 2019
Year: 2019

Information spreads on complex social networks extremely fast, in other words, a piece of information can go viral within no time. Often it is hard to barricade this diffusion prior to the significant occurrence of chaos, be it a social media or an online coding platform. GitHub is one such trending online focal point for any business to reach their potential contributors and customers, simultaneously. By exploiting such software development paradigm, millions of free software emerged lately in diverse communities. To understand human influence, information spread and evolution of transmitted information among assorted users in GitHub, we developed a deep neural network model: DeepFork, a supervised machine learning based approach that aims to predict information diffusion in complex social networks; considering node as well as topological features. In our empirical studies, we observed that information diffusion can be detected by link prediction using supervised learning. DeepFork outperforms other machine learning models as it better learns the discriminative patterns from the input features. DeepFork aids in understanding information spread and evolution through a bipartite network of users and repositories i.e., information flow from a user to repository to user.
Body as controller
Venue: arXiv cs.HC 2019
Year: 2019

In the process of developing a new digital music interface, the author faced three questions that have attracted little to no attention in the literature. By tracking body joints, a performer can use body parts to directly control a digital music instrument. An immediate question that follows asks which limb(s) is more effective for the instrument. The next question asks that movement should be measured relative to a particular reference point. And the last question asks about the mathematical form of the mapping function from the movement feature to the sound parameters. This paper attempts to discuss why finding an answer to these questions is worthwhile and to provide possible solutions that require further investigation.
Context-Aware Saliency Detection for Image Retargeting Using Convolutional Neural Networks
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2019
Year: 2019

Image retargeting is the task of making images capable of being displayed on screens with different sizes. This work should be done so that high-level visual information and low-level features such as texture remain as intact as possible to the human visual system, while the output image may have different dimensions. Thus, simple methods such as scaling and cropping are not adequate for this purpose. In recent years, researchers have tried to improve the existing retargeting methods and introduce new ones. However, a specific method cannot be utilized to retarget all types of images. In other words, different images require different retargeting methods. Image retargeting has a close relationship to image saliency detection, which is relatively a new image processing task. Earlier saliency detection methods were based on local and global but low-level image information. These methods are called bottom-up methods. On the other hand, newer approaches are top-down and mixed methods that consider the high level and semantic information of the image too. In this paper, we introduce the proposed methods in both saliency detection and retargeting. For the saliency detection, the use of image context and semantic segmentation are examined, and a novel mixed bottom-up, and top-down saliency detection method is introduced. After saliency detection, a modified version of an existing retargeting method is utilized for retargeting the images. The results suggest that the proposed image retargeting pipeline has excellent performance compared to other tested methods. Also, the subjective evaluations on the Pascal dataset can be used as a retargeting quality assessment dataset for further research.
Enforcing Linearity in DNN succours Robustness and Adversarial Image Generation
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2019
Year: 2019

Recent studies on the adversarial vulnerability of neural networks have shown that models trained with the objective of minimizing an upper bound on the worst-case loss over all possible adversarial perturbations improve robustness against adversarial attacks. Beside exploiting adversarial training framework, we show that by enforcing a Deep Neural Network (DNN) to be linear in transformed input and feature space improves robustness significantly. We also demonstrate that by augmenting the objective function with Local Lipschitz regularizer boost robustness of the model further. Our method outperforms most sophisticated adversarial training methods and achieves state of the art adversarial accuracy on MNIST, CIFAR10 and SVHN dataset. In this paper, we also propose a novel adversarial image generation method by leveraging Inverse Representation Learning and Linearity aspect of an adversarially trained deep neural network classifier.
Planning for Goal-Oriented Dialogue Systems
Venue: arXiv cs.AI 2019
Year: 2019

Generating complex multi-turn goal-oriented dialogue agents is a difficult problem that has seen a considerable focus from many leaders in the tech industry, including IBM, Google, Amazon, and Microsoft. This is in large part due to the rapidly growing market demand for dialogue agents capable of goal-oriented behaviour. Due to the business process nature of these conversations, end-to-end machine learning systems are generally not a viable option, as the generated dialogue agents must be deployable and verifiable on behalf of the businesses authoring them. In this work, we propose a paradigm shift in the creation of goal-oriented complex dialogue systems that dramatically eliminates the need for a designer to manually specify a dialogue tree, which nearly all current systems have to resort to when the interaction pattern falls outside standard patterns such as slot filling. We propose a declarative representation of the dialogue agent to be processed by state-of-the-art planning technology. Our proposed approach covers all aspects of the process; from model solicitation to the execution of the generated plans/dialogue agents. Along the way, we introduce novel planning encodings for declarative dialogue synthesis, a variety of interfaces for working with the specification as a dialogue architect, and a robust executor for generalized contingent plans. We have created prototype implementations of all components, and in this paper, we further demonstrate the resulting system empirically.
Context-Augmented Software Development Projects: Literature Review and Preliminary Framework
Venue: arXiv cs.SE 2019
Year: 2019

Software development is a complex activity which depends on diverse technologies and people's expertise. The approaches to developing software highly depend on these different characteristics, which are the context developers are subject to. This context contains massive knowledge, and not capturing it means knowledge is continuously lost. Although extensively researched, context in software development is still not explicit, nor proposed into a broader view of the context needed by software developers and tools. Therefore, developers' productivity is affected, as the ability to reuse this rich context is hampered. This paper proposes a literature review on context for software development, through nine research questions. The purpose of this study is making the discovered context explicit into an integrated view and proposing a platform to aid software development using context information. We believe supporting contextual knowledge through its representation and mining for recommendation and real-time provision can significantly improve big data software project development.
Relational Graph Representation Learning for Open-Domain Question Answering
Venue: arXiv cs.CL 2019
Year: 2019

We introduce a relational graph neural network with bi-directional attention mechanism and hierarchical representation learning for open-domain question answering task. Our model can learn contextual representation by jointly learning and updating the query, knowledge graph, and document representations. The experiments suggest that our model achieves state-of-the-art on the WebQuestionsSP benchmark.
Eye in the Sky: Drone-Based Object Tracking and 3D Localization
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2019
Year: 2019

Drones, or general UAVs, equipped with a single camera have been widely deployed to a broad range of applications, such as aerial photography, fast goods delivery and most importantly, surveillance. Despite the great progress achieved in computer vision algorithms, these algorithms are not usually optimized for dealing with images or video sequences acquired by drones, due to various challenges such as occlusion, fast camera motion and pose variation. In this paper, a drone-based multi-object tracking and 3D localization scheme is proposed based on the deep learning based object detection. We first combine a multi-object tracking method called TrackletNet Tracker (TNT) which utilizes temporal and appearance information to track detected objects located on the ground for UAV applications. Then, we are also able to localize the tracked ground objects based on the group plane estimated from the Multi-View Stereo technique. The system deployed on the drone can not only detect and track the objects in a scene, but can also localize their 3D coordinates in meters with respect to the drone camera. The experiments have proved our tracker can reliably handle most of the detected objects captured by drones and achieve favorable 3D localization performance when compared with the state-of-the-art methods.
Secure Coded Caching with Colluding Users
Venue: arXiv cs.IT 2019
Year: 2019

In a secure coded caching system, a central server balances the traffic flow between peak and off-peak periods by distributing some public data to the users' caches in advance. Meanwhile, these data are securely protected against the possible colluding users, who might share their cache. We model the system as a flow network and study its capacity region via a network information-theoretic approach. Due to the difficulty of characterizing the capacity region straightforwardly, our approach is two folded from the perspective of network information theory. On one hand, we identify the inner bound of capacity region by proposing a coded caching scheme to achieve a low load secure data transmission. On the other hand, we also establish outer outer bounds on the capacity region, which show that our proposed scheme is order optimal in general under specific circumstance.